Animography Aims to Bring Animated Typography to the Masses

Animography aims to make life a little easier by offering animated typefaces delivered in neatly organized After Effects files. The type foundry is the creation of Jeroen Krielaars, a graphic designer who runs the Amsterdam-based design studio Calango.

Animation and typography has always been a tricky combination. Hundreds of hours go into designing a family of type, a process that is, at times, highly exact. The moment you start toying with any typeface by scaling and adjusting the characters, you risk creating a warped graphic that doesn’t look quite right. For that reason, Animography should be on your radar. The typefaces offered on the site are scalable without any loss in quality.

What’s particularly promising about Animography is that it creates opportunities for graphic designers and animators to collaborate, experiment and build together. Currently, the site has teamed up with designer Derek Weathersbee, whose newly released typeface called Franchise is being animated one glyph (character) at a time by 110 different animators. In the challenge, each animator is given a single glyph to animate in a maximum of one second, 25 frames, and four colors. There have only been a handful of completed glyphs, but it promises to be a challenge worth keeping an eye on (check out animator Daniel Savage’s letter B submission—B is for Bouncy Beard—above).

Animography seems to have more plans in store, and is on its way to carving out a completely new niche. For more, check out Animography’s brand reel of animated typefaces from dead or fictional brands:

We might as well carry the idea one step further and create motion linguistic symbols. Maybe in the future sneaky business people will flash through clauses with motion typography in addition to using small print.